Rent's rule [53,54] states that the following
relationship exists between several chip parameters.

where is the number of terminals, the number of blocks
within the chip, the average number of terminals for one block
and the Rent exponent. Rent's rule has been widely used to
estimate power dissipation in interconnects. In [55], it
is used to estimate the number of interconnects. The total
interconnect power dissipation is estimated based on that number,
average interconnect length and average fanout number for
interconnect. In [56], the authors obtained a stochastic
distribution of wire length with the assumption that the same
and hold for the chip as well as its different parts. They
used the distribution to estimate wire power dissipation
in [57]. The assumptions made about and , e.g.,
their values and whether they are constant, render the methodology
barely useful for design space exploration. In high-level
synthesis, different binding and scheduling algorithms may
generate circuits with different and , as illustrated in
Fig. 5.
Next:Steering logic Up:Data transfer wires Previous:RTL data transfer power
Lin Zhong
2003-10-11